Proximate causes of conflict in Nepal

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute has made the entry of Nepal as a country razed by violent domestic conflict for the first time in its annual report SIPRI 2003. This is a loud expression of internal conflicts expanding to hitherto untouched territories, and interests generated by such conflicts for scholarship to focus on understanding domestic political violence that previously was simply dismissed as an affliction of the weak states. Despite a considerable decline in such episodes in 2003 from its peak period between 1989 and 1996, this global trend however, is reversed in the case of Nepal where violence exploded in 1996 as "People's War" for the seizure of state power and continued as a protracted or persistent conflict. This deadly conflict is neither near to seize state power, nor militarily defeated, nor had achieved mass support. But the Maoists have vigorously pursued their agenda for establishing a Republican state by dethroning monarchy even when negotiating with different governments in the past. The government, on the other hand, has mobilised its security forces under a unified military command to crush the Maoists' uprising. Nepal, therefore, indicates a case of the spread of internal conflict along with the process of globalisation.